How it had found its
way among them he could not guess.
A fly in amber, quotha! A jewel in a midden, rather! How it came
among his trumpery archives I know as little as he, but can guess.
Some Lestiddle man must have stolen it, and chosen them as a safe
hiding-place.
It gave me the clue, and more than the clue. I know now the history
of that Mayor of Troy who was so popular that the town made him
Ex-Mayor the year following.
Listen! Stretch out both hands; open your mouth and shut your eyes!
It is a draught of Troy's own vintage that I offer you; racy,
fragrant of the soil, from a cask these hundred years sunk, so that
it carries a smack, too, of the submerging brine. You know the old
recipe for Wine of Cos, that full-bodied, seignorial, superlative,
translunary wine.
Yet I know not how to begin.
"Fortunam Priami cantabo et nobile bellum."
"I will sing you Troy and its Mayor and a war of high renown," that
is how I want to begin; but Horace in his _Ars Poetica_--confound
him!--has chosen this very example as a model to avoid, and the
critics would be down on me in a pack.
Very well, then, let us try a more reputable way.
CHAPTER I.
OUR MAJOR.
Arms and the Man I sing!
When, on the 16th of May, 1803, King George III. told his faithful
subjects that the Treaty of Amiens was no better than waste paper,
Troy neither felt nor affected to feel surprise.
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